Postcard from Japan: Bullet Train to Nagoya

The frightening thing about the earthquake was that it began to grow stronger around the time most tremors in earthquake-prone Tokyo peter out. I was working in a café a ten-minute walk from the apartment I share with my wife and eighteen-month-old son. As the shaking became violent, patrons around me began to shout and even scream, and in an instant we were all out on the street, together with hundreds of others who poured forth from oddly creaking buildings. The sidewalk looked, and felt, like a packed rush-hour train; I had to catch my balance to remain standing. I tried calling my wife. No signal.

As I walked quickly towards home, I could not tell whether the earth was still shaking or only I was. The mood on the street became almost festive, as people talked excitedly in large groups. I exchanged a few words with a fruit-seller outside my apartment, and we laughed together about all the fruits that had jumbled together in the quake. It was probably around that time that a tsunami was obliterating entire towns and thousands of lives a few hours to the north of us.

My wife was at home, where she had dived under a table shouting out my son’s name until the shaking stopped. Books and cereal boxes had tumbled to the floor, but there was no other damage. At my son’s daycare, five minutes away, the staff was calmly feeding the children their afternoon snack. “It really shook, didn’t it?” they asked, clearly more concerned with one child’s fever than with the quake. My son seemed singularly unfazed. Only after we returned home, a walk that took us past silent, eerily stopped trains, did we see the incomprehensible footage of the tsunami and began to grasp the enormity of what had happened. Tokyo remained at a standstill that night; we later learned that my wife’s aunt and uncle, both in their seventies, had walked for six hours from the heart of Tokyo to reach their home in Yokohama.

Strong aftershocks continued through the night. The next day meat had vanished from the shelves, and eggs were gone, too, along with instant noodles, bread, bottled water. “Look,” my wife said, “they’re even out of pancake mix.” The city continued to shake every hour or so, sometimes jolting strongly enough that the water swished haphazardly in our water filter. We decided to calm our nerves by visiting Shinjuku Gyoen, a sprawling garden in the heart of the city. A German friend called before we left our apartment. “Are you following the news of this nuclear reactor?” he asked. I had consciously avoided thinking about the reactor because I was too concerned about further earthquakes. “My father is encouraging me to fly back to Germany,” he said, “and another friend already left yesterday. Let’s keep in touch about our plans.”

The gardens were more crowded than I had expected. Couples sprawled beneath plum trees, now in the full blossom of early spring, and my son kept waving at the many children who ran past. “Everyone is trying to relax,” my wife said. It felt more like the entire city was holding its breath. Tokyo seemed to have tipped across some invisible border, shrugging off in an instant its carefully cultivated aura of comfort and security. Phones kept ringing on the train home, an unfamiliar sound in a city where cell phones are always set to silent “manner mode.”

My German friend called again to tell me he planned to fly out on Monday. “Maybe I’m being silly,” he said. “I don’t particularly want to go, but it will ease my father’s nerves.” Maybe he was being silly. But I began to worry more.

We learned we were lucky: our district did not appear on the list for the rolling blackouts that were keeping many commuters at home. But the reports from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor kept sounding worse, and I grew frustrated with the ambiguity of the threat. “This will not be another Chernobyl,” experts reassured us on the one hand, without explaining what it could be; news reports warned that a worst-case scenario would be a “catastrophic” release of radioactive material, without attempting to define the specific impact of such a catastrophe. Clearly the immediate vicinity was in danger, but what about the rest of eastern Japan? What about Tokyo? That evening my wife was nervous enough to call her mother, closer to Nagoya and further from the threat, to feel out the possibility of a sudden family visit. “Surely Tokyo is safe!” her mother said, and laughed when she heard about expats flying out.

Tuesday dawned gray and remained gray, and the news was worse. A fire at the reactor had sent levels of radioactivity in the vicinity higher; I strained to understand the Prime Minister’s televised address as he urged calm and instructed those twenty to thirty kilometers from the site to take cover indoors. Every few hours we continued to feel our apartment sway. News of the tsunami aftermath continued to leave us devastated.

By midday the news from the plant was distressing enough that my wife began checking train schedules. Most were running on limited schedules, or not at all, to conserve electricity, but the bullet train to Nagoya remained unaffected.

Before we left, I stopped at the university. Half the people on the street were wearing masks, but that means little in Japan, where masks are commonly used to avoid spreading colds. The streets were somewhat empty, and a number of shops were closed, but otherwise it looked like an ordinary, cloudy Tokyo day. Smiling couples walked along the street, buses rumbled past. As my family and I approached Tokyo station on a Yamanote Line train an hour or so later, shouldering hastily packed bags, things began to look different. The streets we saw through the windows were emptier, the number of masks greater. Most of the lights were dark in the station. My wife and I settled into our seats on a train full of expats and families with small children.

We reached her family’s home near 11 P.M., only to learn that a magnitude 6.4 quake had struck in Shizuoka, along our train’s route, stopping bullet train service just hours after we had passed. This was not, strictly, an aftershock, but a new earthquake along a separate fault. I suddenly felt a frantic urge to leave, to get out altogether, to be back in my own country. Then I looked into the smiling, welcoming eyes of my in-laws, remembered the hundred and twenty-six million people for whom Japan is home, and felt ashamed.